The first time, I couldn’t give you a thousand lilies. Only these— paper ones, cut from last week’s newspapers, creased at the edges, their folds still smelling faintly of ink and dust. I gave them to you with the trembling hands of a man who knew his pockets were empty but his heart was spilling over. And you— you held them as though they might wilt, as though your breath alone could bruise them. “I will love them,” you said, “as if they were real. For eternity.” And I believed you. God help me, I believed you. Time, with its patient knives, worked on us in ways neither of us noticed at first. The world shifted, the rooms we shared grew quieter, and the air between us began to smell of absence. Years later, I brought you the real thing. A thousand lilies— their petals as white as forgiveness, their scent heavy and sweet, like a secret too dangerous to tell. I carried them in both arms, as though they might run from me, as though bringing them to you would somehow turn the clock backwards. You took them. Your fingers traced the curve of each petal like you were reading a language you’d long forgotten. Your eyes softened— but not in the way I’d hoped. “You kept this one promise,” you whispered, “but in the time it took you to do it, you broke a thousand others.” The words hit like cold water in my lungs. I stood there, drowning in the perfume of lilies, watching them glow in the fading light— so pure, so immaculate, and somehow already dying. And in that moment, I realized the cruelest thing about beauty: it doesn’t save you. It only reminds you of what you’ve already lost.